"Got an A from Moe Dee for sticking to themes" - old-school rapper Kool Moe Dee issued rap "report cards," grading other rappers on their style. When grading the Beastie Boys, he gave them mostly C's, but an A for "sticking to themes"

"If you try to knock me you'll get mocked, I'll stir fry you in my wok" - Adam Yauch flaunts his superior rhyming and cooking skills over his fellow MCs

"Like a pinch on the neck of Mr. Spock" - a defense tactic used by Mr. Spock, a character in the television show Star Trek; the tactic consisted of pinching the victim between the neck and the shoulder to render them helpless

Commentary:

Beastie Boys

"We were in the space station in orbit of another planet working on the record and a robot flew up through space to the space station singing the chorus [of this song] and beckoned us to climb into his papoose and fly to Earth. We landed in Japan and sang this song together, which was documented and is going to be the video" - Adam Yauch, 1998

"Mike brought [the buzzing vocorder] in. We'd been talking about the vocorder thing for a while, and when we put [Intergalactic]
together, it just fell into place" - Adam Horovitz, August 1998

"This song started out in '93. We had this beat off a Bo Diddley record called Another Dimension, and we made this song all space doodoo rhymes. Like about Carl Sagan, Lieutenant Uhura, dilithium crystals, shit like that. And the break was intergalactic planetary planetary intergalactic. It didn't make the cut for Ill Communication 'cause it was just bad stupid and not even good stupid. Well, when we were making songs for Hello Nasty, we had this one hip-hop song we were making with this live spaced out music we played. No one really liked it but me, and I wasn't that crazy about it. Anyways, one night after fucking around with this song I was hanging out with my brother and some friends, and our friend Penelope said, 'Whatever happened to that intergalactic thing you made? I always liked that.' And like C+C Music Factory, it was a thing that made me go 'Hmm.' So the next day we made this ending part for the spaced out song with this big beat that I had, and I said the intergalactic thing through Mike's new Vocorder. The ending part was way better than the whole song so we just scrapped it and made the intergalactic thing. And 'cause of Penelope, a lot of help from Boggle, and dreams of being flown around in a robot's papoose, it came out kinda nice" - Adam Horovitz, 1999

"I think [Intergalactic was] the first song they played for me- they played it for me over the phone, and I was like, 'What the fuck is that?!?' The Vocoder, the whole digital sound, the beats were pounding, and I was like, This is the new shit." - Mix Master Mike, excerpted from The Skills to Pay the Bills by Alan Light, 2005

"...[a] dash of electro" - excerpted from The Vibe Story of Hip-Hop by Alan Light, 1999

"...the best single since 'Where's It At,' tap the Beasties' nostalgic impulses with a couple of old-school beats and melodies that would send Kurtis Blow into hysterics and every dancefloor b-boy pop-rockin' onto the dance floor" - Creative Loafing, August 29, 1998

"A lot of [the Beastie Boys'] ideas come from buying new toys. They got a new issue Vocoder from Germany, and I remember Ad-Rock fucking around with it. And then, like a week later, I heard 'Intergalactic.' They made this amazing song from fucking around with this new toy." - Sean Lennon, excerpted from The Skills to Pay the Bills by Alan Light, 2005